Greenpeace said on Monday that schools and surrounding areas located 60 km (38 miles) from Japan’s tsunami-hit nuclear power plant were unsafe for children, showing radiation readings as much as 70 times internationally accepted levels.

The environmental group took samples at and near three schools in Fukushima city, well outside the 20 km exclusion zone from Tokyo Electric Power’s stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan’s northeast.

“No parent should have to choose between radiation exposure and education for their child,” said Kazue Suzuki, Greenpeace Japan’s anti-nuclear project head.

The government had already taken steps to decontaminate schools in Fukushima prefecture, where the crippled plant has been leaking radiation since it was hit by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Calling the measures “deplorably late and inadequate,” Greenpeace said it had found average dose rates above the maximum allowed under international standards, of 1 millisievert per year, or 0.11 microsievert per hour.

Japan’s education ministry on Friday set a looser standard, allowing up to 1 microsievert per hour of radiation in schools.

Greenpeace said that inside a high school it tested, the reading was 0.5 microsievert per hour, breaching international standards even after the government’s clean-up.

At a staircase connecting a school playground to the street, it found radiation amounting to 7.9 microsieverts per hour, or about 70 times the maximum allowed, exceeding even Japan’s own standard.

Greenpeace urged the government to delay reopening the schools as planned on Sept. 1 after the summer break and relocate children in the most affected cities until decontamination was complete.

Fukushima city dismissed Greenpeace’s calls, saying the schools were safe under the government’s norms.

“We’re finished decontaminating the schools, and they no longer have high radiation levels,” city official Yoshimasa Kanno said. He added that postponing the opening of more than 100 schools in the city based on Greenpeace’s findings of “only three” would be unreasonable.

RADIATION TO PERSIST FOR YEARS

Despite the government’s reassurances, parents have removed thousands of children from schools in Fukushima since the disasters, fearing damage to their health.

Underscoring such concerns, the government said this month that 45 percent of children living outside the evacuation zone in Fukushima were exposed to low levels of radiation though it was within safety levels.

Greenpeace, which took its samples Aug. 17-19, did not say how long it might take to rid the areas of harmful levels of radiation.

But Jan van de Putte, its radiation expert, noted that cleaning up in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, about 100 km from Chernobyl, required hundreds of thousands of workers toiling over several months.

A vast area is still uninhabitable around the Chernobyl plant 25 years after the world’s worst nuclear disaster, and experts have estimated Japan’s decontamination efforts could cost as much as 10 trillion yen ($130 billion).

“We expect that the radiation levels would persist for a long period of time,” van de Putte said. ($1 = 76.855 Japanese Yen)

… these are not “dosimeters” but “glass badges” that passively collect radiation information. It won’t help these children or their parents to avoid high-radiation areas and spots, it won’t tell them how much radiation they will have been exposed unless they are sent in to a company to interpret the data.

Radiation exposure is increased by a factor of a trillion. Inhaling even the tiniest particle, that’s the danger.

Yo: So making comparisons with X-rays and CT scans has no meaning. Because you can breathe in radioactive material.

Hirose: That’s right. When it enters your body, there’s no telling where it will go. The biggest danger is women, especially pregnant women, and little children. Now they’re talking about iodine and cesium, but that’s only part of it, they’re not using the proper detection instruments. What they call monitoring means only measuring the amount of radiation in the air. Their instruments don’t eat. What they measure has no connection with the amount of radioactive material.

Dr. Helen Caldicott (Co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility):

You’ve bought the propaganda from the nuclear industry. They say it’s low-level radiation. That’s absolute rubbish. If you inhale a millionth of a gram of plutonium, the surrounding cells receive a very, very high dose. Most die within that area, because it’s an alpha emitter. The cells on the periphery remain viable. They mutate, and the regulatory genes are damaged. Years later, that person develops cancer. Now, that’s true for radioactive iodine, that goes to the thyroid; cesium-137, that goes to the brain and muscles; strontium-90 goes to bone, causing bone cancer and leukemia. It’s imperative … that you understand internal emitters and radiation, and it’s not low level to the cells that are exposed. Radiobiology is imperative to understand these days.”The Japanese people are used as guinea pigs: